Mother Nature has once again provided the inspiration for scientists, as a group of researchers from General Electric are hard at work studying the wings of the beautiful Morpho butterfly. Found in abundance in South America, the flying insect may hold the secret to creating superior night-vision goggles that far outstrip what we use today.

Current thermal-imaging devices have a serious drawback in the energy required to cool them down sufficiently to avoid ghosting. Say you were to don a pair of thermal googles, the first thing you would notice are the rather large heatsinks attached to them, and the warning stickers about the fact they have liquid helium coursing through them to keep temperatures down.

If they didn’t have those two things, you would never be able to make out much at all while using them. When you lock onto something that has a heat signature, then move your head, the object would leave a trail of heat that would take a while to fade from your sight. The cooling process helps to cut down on this problem, but as you can imagine it’s horribly inefficient. This is where the Morpho enters the picture, bringing with it the scales that make up its wings.

These scales have the unique property of being able to both absorb and reflect light at different wavelengths. What’s more interesting is that you can manipulate this process by changing the temperature of the scales, which incidentally is what allows the butterfly to change the hue of their wings.

The game-changer when it comes to thermal imaging, however, isn’t just the scales, but the chitin that they are made up of. This naturally occurring polymer has a very low capacity for heat, which means it takes much less effort to cool things that are made of the substance. Think of the chitin as a natural heat-sink and you will see why the scientists are excited. In addition, there exists something called a carbon nanotube that can be attached to the scales. The researchers found that when they did that, it drastically improved upon the already excellent cooling properties of the chitinous scales.

There is still a lot of study that needs to be done to translate these findings into a synthetic commercial device that can be marketed to consumers. Hopefully in the near future we will see the fruits of the ongoing research by G.E.. Who doesn’t want a personal pair of thermal goggles?